Stop these frivolities in FCT budget

THE Minister of the Federal Capital Territory, Bala Mohammed, will stop at nothing to impress his master. He has provided N4 billion in the 2013 FCT budget for the building of an office for Nigeria’s First Lady, Patience Jonathan, under the so-called African First Ladies Peace Mission initiative. It is a profligate capital outlay, which derogates responsible governance and accountability in the management of public funds.

Other eye-popping provisions in the N253 billion FCT budget, include N150 million for the “rehabilitation” of commercial sex workers, N7.56 billion to build two city gates and N150 million to renovate Vice-President Namadi Sambo’s guest house. Fittingly, these outrageous spending proposals drew the ire of some senators during the second reading of the budget in the upper legislative chamber, who viewed them as scandalous and unworthy of the parliament’s imprimatur. It is another manifestation of the government as a spendthrift.

The office of the First Lady is ceremonial in the United States and other Western nations from where we copied our democracy. Commonsense, therefore, dictates that ours should not be different. But some holders of that office have turned it into their personal fiefdom and a conduit for frittering away public funds, so much so that it has become one of the most odious and reckless appendages of the Presidency. It was an irritating pastime that the Ibrahim Babangida administration institutionalised between 1985 and 1993 when offices were built in every nook and cranny of the country for the Better Life for Rural Women programme championed by his wife, Maryam. Those offices are now relics of a discredited epoch and monuments to abuse of office. However, the vanities of our First Ladies continued with the late Stella Obasanjo and Turai Yar’Adua, who left behind no single signature achievement. Unfortunately, Mrs. Jonathan is hell-bent on extending the frontiers of this silly extravagance.

Humongous oil revenue wasted by these women prompted the Justice Muhammadu Uwais-led Committee on Constitution Review to recommend the scrapping of the office of the First Lady. In fact, it is alien to the 1999 Constitution, as amended. Mrs. Jonathan is aware of this. Because of this, she rushed to Bayelsa State, to be appointed a Permanent Secretary in the state’s Civil Service by Governor Seriake Dickson, about a decade after she severed her service. Justifying the appointment in July last year, she said, “Remember, when I went to Lagos for a peace advocacy, the Governor of Lagos State said that my husband should caution me since my office is not in the constitution, and that I have no office. Why won’t I now pursue my career that I am sure of?”

With this consciousness, it is curious that the FCT minister wants to waste N4 billion on an illegality. The International Conference Centre, Abuja, is an edifice big enough to host African First Ladies’ summits. What if the President is not re-elected in 2015, and his successor’s wife is a career or professional woman, who is not interested in the First Lady vanity? The aloofness of Mrs. Fati Abubakar, a high court judge, and wife of a former Head of State, Abdulsalami Abubakar, to that office and the insularity of the wives of Shehu Shagari and Muhammadu Buhari during their successive terms as Commander-in-Chief, show that a more humble future First Lady might want to dissociate herself from the inanities of that office. Where else in the world is such vanity dignified with budgetary allocation?

It is also bizarre that the FCT minister plans to spend N150 million on prostitutes and the destitute, a ubiquitous or itinerant class of people, whose population is not as yet known; just as the N7.5 billion earmarked for city gates is symptomatic of gross misplacement of priority and waste. These funds could be better used to provide health care, potable water and other basic infrastructure for Abuja residents, most of who live in the suburbs. Social services barely exist in these areas. When these frivolous proposals are juxtaposed with the N1 billion given to each of the seven new federal universities as take-off grants, the inescapable conclusion is that national values have taken flight; and public enemies are masquerading as public servants.

FCT contracts have always reeked of corruption. This was the case in the Abuja Airport/Kubwa road expansion contracts. A review of the contracts by a presidential committee, once recovered about N38 billion that would have been creamed off from public treasury. The Senate Committee on FCT, chaired by Smart Adeyemi, was the whistleblower. The FCT minister in 2012 admitted this much before the senate committee. Mohammed, the minister, had said, “Immediately he (President Jonathan) read of the discoveries of some discrepancies in the award of the Airport/Kubwa road projects of the Senate Committee on FCT, he ordered a review of the projects.”

It is hoped that these frivolities in the 2013 FCT budget are not jobs for political contractors, who often provide slush funds for any government in power for electioneering. The build-up to 2015 general election has begun. In countries with entrenched democratic traditions, opposition parties keep the government in power in check. But here, they go to sleep after losing an election; therefore, there is no shadow cabinet to check such abuses as seen in the FCT budget.

However, we call on the opposition and civil society organisations to see this as a challenge and rise to the occasion to end these corrupt tendencies as advertised in the FCT budget. For the Senate that first raised the alarm, we don’t have a flicker of hope that it will stand up to be counted. The leopard hardly changes its spots. Even when it initially opposed the Federal Government’s request for foreign loans, it ultimately approved it, gradually returning the foreign-debt yoke, which the country had freed itself from in 2005. Those in public office should remember that, sooner or later, a Daniel always comes to judgment!

I want to ask one question. Do Nigeria government invest? Do we have any investment as a nation that we can say, this is national investment. Recently the philipine government invested in the oil and gas sector in Malaysia. Also the UAE government is currently investing in Iskandar Malaysia , a city hoped to be one of the best cities in the world. How come our government do not invest , instead they waste. Just wondering….

Columnists

"Mr Orubebe, you are former minister of the Federal Republic, you are a statesman in your own right and you must be careful about what you say and about the allegations or accusations that you make and certainly you must be careful about your public conducts."

INEC's Chairman, Attairu Jega cautioning Orubebe over his conduct during the release of the Presidential election results.